by M. M. Kaye
Children were not supposed to look at these particular books and we knew it. They were appalling; and as with Tacklow and the mud, they gave me bad dreams. I don’t know who drew them or published them, and I know that Tacklow strongly disapproved of them; as he disapproved of all forms of propaganda aimed at arousing hatred and rage and disgust. According to him, almost all this type of stuff was lies, and when there was a grain of truth in it, even that was barely a grain of a half-truth that had been twisted and exaggerated to make it into a full-blown horror story.
The black-and-white cartoons did not need any captions. And as far as I can remember, did not have any. They depicted vicious-looking, pig-featured German soldiers spitting small naked babies on their bayonets; terrible skeletons in ragged uniforms, their grinning skulls topped with German helmets, mowing down screaming, terrified women and children with Father Time scythes, or spraying the helpless bodies of wounded British soldiers with clouds of poison gas. There were pictures of tattered corpses hanging from barbed wire or lolling in rain-filled shell holes, and of hysterical women in nightgowns and traditional caps of Liberty, sporting sashes labelled ‘Serbia’, ‘Belgium’ or ‘France’ and clutching weeping infants as they fled across a shell-torn landscape, pursued by a gloating Kaiser and his grinning elder son, ‘Little Willie’ — both armed with dripping swords. Gerald Scarfe at his most savage could have taken lessons from them.
Those books of cartoons were obscene. There is no other word for it. But the climate of the 1914–18 war allowed them to be available in the reading rooms of a public library where even young children could take a look at them when the adults were not watching. I still have the illusion that they gave off a frightening smell. An evil smell: the stench of corruption — which is a familiar one in any Eastern country where dead animals and sometimes dead people are left to the mercy of those indefatigable undertakers, the vulture and the carrion crow, the pariah-dog and the jackal. The pictured horrors frightened me stiff, for until I laid eyes on them the world had seemed a safe place, full of kindly people; friends and playmates and wise, all-powerful grown-ups. Yet somewhere in the world these appalling things were happening; and it was grown-ups who were doing them. It was as though the earth under my feet was no longer solid, and I was never again to feel confident that grown-ups knew best: a view that had already received a body-blow from Nurse Lizzie.
Following Lizzie’s departure Mother engaged another English nanny for us; this time a young and pretty one whom we loved dearly. But we did not keep her long, for she like Lizzie was being courted by a Sergeant (hers was named Grey) and since this one proposed and was accepted, when the Government moved up to Simla the next spring and my parents returned, she left us to get married. And that year we did not go back to Chillingham but left it to move into another rented house called Oaklands.
Oaklands was a small two-storey house built just below the crest of a ridge above the little hill village of Mahasu that lies by the side of the Mashobra road some five miles outside Simla. A mule-track, along which the Tibetan traders brought their wares to Simla’s markets, ran along the ridge just behind and above the back of the house, and in the village below there was a wooden finger-post (it is an enamelled tin one now) which announced with classic simplicity, ‘to tibet’. Even at the age of seven that struck me as intensely romantic, and I fell in love with Oaklands on sight. It was the loneliness that appealed to me so much; that and the enormous views from the verandahs. There were no other houses within sight except, far away on the crest of another fold in the hills, the scattered dots — pale grey or pink by day and twinkling yellow by night — which were all we could see of Simla.
From the verandahs, open on the ground floor but glassed in on the top storey, we could look down on the tree-tops of the forested mountainside that dropped steeply away to a valley so far below us that when the forest stopped and gave place to open slopes sculptured into endless layers of tiny fields, the fields looked no bigger than one’s little fingernail and it was difficult to believe that each one was probably as large as or larger than our orchard. On the far side of the valley the mountains swept up again, fold on fold and layer behind layer, to merge into the long, glittering, wonderful panorama of the high snows … ‘Himalaya heaven-ward heading’. To our left lay a small lawn, the chicken-runs, potting-sheds and the servants’ quarters, and to the right an orchard, which the bears used to raid when the fruit was ripe, and a wired-in tennis court. Behind the house ran that narrow, stony mule-track, and the stupendous untrodden ranges that stretched away and away to Tibet…
The snow peaks that spanned the horizon were a never-ending delight: a Transformation Scene from a Drury Lane pantomime, performed thrice daily for us to watch free of charge from our private box — the windows of the upper verandah. We could see the cold lilac silhouettes of the high snows catch fire and glow rose pink in the dawn, blaze white at midday and turn every colour of the rainbow at sunset, while below them, spread out like a hundred miles of wrinkled blue velvet, lay the vast, unexplored forests of pine and deodar and rhododendron, into which man has only penetrated a tiny distance around the edges; perhaps no more than a fraction of an inch on a map. A pin-prick only.
I had already made a first determined effort at drawing while we were at Chillingham. The outline of the hills that faced us there made a pattern that intrigued me, and the urge to put it down on paper made me ask for pencils and a drawing-block. Having acquired these, I discovered that drawing from life was a good deal more difficult than I had supposed. The block of cartridge paper was a large one, but I ran off the edge of it long before I had drawn a third of the range, and I remember rubbing it out and starting again and again; and again! — struggling to scale it down so that all that I could see could be fitted onto the paper. I never did manage it, but at least I had begun to draw and to appreciate line and shape and colour: and to store it all away in my head where it still remains, together with all the other fascinating places and things and people that I have seen. The view from Oaklands was far more spectacular than the one from Chillingham, and I tried to draw that too. But mostly it was enough just to stand and stare. And I never grew tired of that.
Oaklands is still enchanted ground to me. The hillsides, the grassy ridges and the forests were our playgrounds, and I cannot ever remember being afraid. Or bored! I do not think that either Bets or myself were bored there for so much as a minute; or would even have known what the word meant. Every day was crammed to the brim with interest and adventure: with play and the endless ploys that children invent for themselves. We helped our parents build a thatched summer-house on the upper lawn and assisted Mali-ji and his son to pick fruit in the orchard. And every morning after breakfast we herded the ducks down the long, winding drive to the pond that lay near the entrance gate, taking turns to carry our favourite duck, Quacky-Jack, who, poor fellow, was considered far too special to waddle down with the vulgar herd and must put up instead with the honour of being carried. Which I fear he did not appreciate.
Mother had thought it an excellent idea to keep ducks, hens, pigeons and rabbits for the pot; and for chicken and duck eggs of course. But she might have known what would happen. Every bird and rabbit was instantly given a name and became a member of the family, and I well remember the alarm and dismay when one of the hens was found to be missing. We were afraid that a fox had got it, for we had heard one barking on the previous night. But two days later there was roast chicken for lunch, and half-way through the meal Bets suddenly put down her knife and fork, and staring at Mother with round, horrified eyes, said imploring: ‘Mummy, this isn’t Emily, is it?’
Mother denied it firmly, but Bets remained unconvinced and thereafter lost her appetite for roast chicken. I suspect it was Emily. But after that any chicken we ate had to be bought by the khansamah in Mahasu bazaar. And the same went for ducks, pigeons and rabbits. Poor Mother! So much for her efforts to economize. She did no better with the apricots. There was a wild apricot tree gro
wing out of the hillside behind the house, and for two years running it produced such an enormous crop that its boughs were bent down to the grass by the weight of the fruit, and Mother made pounds and pounds of apricot jam; so many that we were all put off apricot jam for years afterwards.
Then there was the mushroom year. The hillside behind Oaklands, and below the mule-track, being exposed to the full force of the monsoon, was almost treeless, for the monsoon rain flails off all but a thin skin of the surface soil, and though the grass must at times have been green, I always remember it as being gold; hot, dry and rustling, and baked slippery by the sun. Bets and I and our friends used to toboggan on it with tin tea-trays. We had taken a picnic far down the hillside, crossing the lower road to Wildflower Hall to slip and slide down the grassy slopes towards a ridge of ground where the grass gave place to turf that had obviously been cropped by goats or deer. There were wildflowers growing there; and mushrooms! Hundreds and hundreds of mushrooms; to the delight of Tacklow, who was partial to them. We emptied out the picnic basket and filled it to the brim with them, and used our topis and Tacklow’s hat as extra containers. Those mushrooms were the best I ever tasted, and there were so many of them that Mother made bottles of mushroom ketchup, and sent us back several days running to pick more. She warned us that we must be sure to leave some unpicked so that there would be more next year. And we did. But there weren’t. We never again saw another mushroom on those hillsides, though we searched and searched. Perhaps the deer had taken a fancy to them? Or bears?
I have said that there was nothing to be afraid of in the Simla hills. But I was often afraid at night, for there was one particular sound that scared me: an unmistakable one — the barking of a karka deer, which in our hills is supposed to herald the presence of a leopard.
The Himalayan black bears who used to raid our orchard when the fruit was ripe, and who made a cross, coughing noise, did not worry me at all. I suppose I felt, subconsciously, that all bears were in some way relatives of Roller-bear and Bets’s beloved honey-coloured and unimaginatively named ‘Teddy’, and were therefore friendly; which is, of course, by no means the case. But when I woke to the enormous silence of the hills and heard a karka deer barking, and knew that he was warning the creatures of the forest that a leopard was on the prowl, I would picture the big spotted cat creeping silently along the lower verandah — drawn there perhaps by the scent of Kate, the black retriever who belonged to Sir Charles Cleveland but condescended to board with us during the summer months whenever her lawful owner happened to be away on tour. Leopards are said to regard dogs as a great delicacy; for which reason most dogs whose owners live in the hills wear heavy, iron-spiked collars for protection, because leopards go for the throat. Kate too wore one, but I did not put much faith in it, and since we loved her dearly I never heard a karka deer barking without being convinced that it was calling to warn us that a leopard was coming to get her.
Our two white-painted beds stood side-by-side in the nursery; Bets’s bed on the left-hand side and against the wall and mine a few feet away with, bridging the gap between the two, a small wooden chest in which we kept our toys. I had insisted on having the chest put there because it was exactly the same height as our beds, and I made a padded pillow, the same thickness as our mattresses, to cover it and a little eiderdown to lay on top of that, in order that Bets and I could hold hands across it at night in comfort should either of us feel the need to do so. We often did, because the house creaked at night, being an old one (old, that is, by Simla standards; which is new by India’s, since it had been built in the last days of the East India Company).
Like the majority of Simla’s houses it was a flimsy structure, built of local wood and topped by a roof of corrugated tin painted rosy red. There was no electricity, no main drainage and no running hot water; though the house boasted three cold taps. The mehta* removed the contents of our wooden commodes several times a day, carrying it away in his malodorous basket and either spreading it upon the land or burying it in the earth where it helped to enrich the soil. Bats, rats, mice, lizards, wild cats and flying-foxes made their homes under the tin roof, and there was a family of swallows who returned year after year to build their nest between the rafters supporting the roof of the lower verandah. All these fellow occupants made curious noises at night: scuffling, scuttering and squeaking, or padding softly to and fro (that would be the wild cat). Then there was always the wind, which would sigh under the eaves and through chinks and crannies in the woodwork, wail sorrowfully on breezy nights or howl on stormy ones. Yet the windy nights were never as disturbing as the still ones, because the shrieking din of the wind-section and the surging, booming orchestral accompaniment of the pine forests, which sounded exactly like a storm at sea, were strangely soothing, while the frequent thunderstorms were exciting enough to make one jump out of bed and run to pull back the window curtains and watch the blinding flashes of lightning illuminate the scenery as vividly as though it were a floodlit theatre set.
I used to begin counting as soon as the lightning flashed, because Bulaki, the old hillman who looked after the livestock and did odd jobs such as mending roofs and fences, had told me that the number of seconds between the flash and the thunder would tell me how many miles away the centre of the storm was, and that when the thunder followed immediately on the flash, the storm was overhead. Once I saw a bolt of lightning strike a tall pine tree and split it in two as neatly as a knife divides an apple; and watched the resulting blaze doused by pouring rain inside ten seconds. Yet although our house stood high on the crest of a ridge, I was never afraid that it would be hit, for it was protected — as were all Simla’s houses — by a lightning conductor in which I had such complete faith that I was able to watch these spectacular extravaganzas with awe-struck admiration. The noise was almost as exciting as the lightning. The sound of thunder among mountains is quite different from what it is in the plains, for it echoes round the great peaks and ricochets off a hundred rocky hillsides that act as sounding-boards: ‘It is Thor that is striking with his hammer! It is Odin where the sparks fly free’…
A thunderstorm in the plains may be just as noisy, but it does not have the hollow, ringing clang, like a series of gigantic wooden planks being slammed down onto the stone floor of some enormous subterranean cave. And when at last the clouds burst, the rain roars down like Niagara in flood-time in a solid wall of water that is quite strong enough to beat a seven-year-old child to its knees. I would always gladly have exchanged the still nights for the wild ones, for I could sleep through the uproar, feeling extra safe and protected in my own warm bed just because there was so much noise and fury raging outside. But on quiet nights, particularly when the moon was full and there was no breath of wind to set the forest whispering, the silence was something that could be felt. A tangible thing that listened — holding its breath the while.
In these days there cannot be many places in the world where one can lie and listen to the silence and feel it press down on you with the weight of water. Nowadays there is always something making a noise somewhere: a lawn-mower, an electric clock, the hum of a generator, or a car revving up; the maddening, mindless yowling of a transistor radio playing pop, the distant throb of some jumbo-jet striving to equal Puck’s record and put a girdle round the world in forty minutes, or the banshee scream of a fighter plane from an RAF training base hurtling overhead. But in those far-off times no mechanical sound disturbed the peace of our hills, and listening to the silence one became acutely aware of the thousands of miles of untouched, unknown country behind and beyond the walls of that little house by the narrow mule-track that wound away through the ranges to Tibet and the high plateaux of Central Asia.
If anything stirred in that white, silent world it was possible to hear it. Every flitter of a bat’s wing or hum of a mosquito was loud in the stillness, and the night noises that every house makes after dark became sharply audible. The hoot of an owl or the alarm call of a deer from the world outside could ma
ke our nerves leap, and it was on these nights that Bets and I would go to sleep holding hands under the eiderdown across the padded top of the toy-chest.
* It fell down the kud (hillside) and broke its neck.
* So called because of her inability to pronounce the word ‘sponge’. We once unkindly locked her in the bathroom and threatened not to let her out until she said it properly. But it was no good. The best she could ever manage was ‘Ish-punj’. Hence Punj-ayah. She was a dear.
* Peon.
* Sweeper.
Chapter 11
From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord deliver us!
Anon. (Cornish)
Tacklow gave up his horse, but although we kept the rickshaw and the four jhampanis who pulled it, he seldom made use of it; preferring to walk to Simla and back, a total of ten miles every weekday. Only very occasionally — and then only if he was exceptionally tired or the weather was particularly atrocious — would he ring up and ask for it to be sent to his office in Army Headquarters to fetch him home; and even then he would never let himself be pulled up the steep ascent from Mahasu to the front door of Oaklands, for riding in rickshaws pulled by his fellow men was something that always worried him.